# 38 Why should I organize myself and do things without being asked?

When I was 19 years old, there was a moment I decided I wanted to set up a cafe. I organized all that I needed, how much money, what personal, all the furniture and machines, everything. I even had a place to set it up, a shop that my dad had that he was willing to give me to start the cafe. But when I was ready to do so, my dad decided he did not want me to do it. He convinced me to stop pursuing it by saying that the only way I could do that was If I sold my car. My car was the only thing I could move and go to university with (Wich I did not start yet again). If I took the risk and it didn’t work, I would have lost all I had left. So at that moment I got scared and stopped. But some time later I wonder why he told me to stop. He is a person that usually goes all-in when it is things like this one. I wondered, what was the real reason he stopped me from setting up my cafe? 

Do you remember when you were 4 years old or a bit older, and your parents use to tell you that you had to organize your room and your stuff? And you did not understand why you had to do it. Or you argue that your disorder was in someway an order for you because you knew where everything was in that way. When in reality you just remembered where things were because you were lazy and threw them around and remembered, but not because it was an order. Do you remember that? 

Or maybe you are one of those people that thinks he knows why it is important for children to organize their rooms, and you say that it is because that way people will not see you as a disordered person when they come or something similar. But then why do people see disorder as something wrong? 

You could also be (Or you know someone that is) one of those people that knows that has things that must be done but for some reason, you don’t do them until someone tells you to or you get so much time pressure that you do them at the end when it is late. And you argue, why should I do things before the time pressures me or someone tells me to do it? Let’s see it this way: 

One of the most known communist philosophers nowadays “Slavoj ?i?ek” is very known not only for being an open communist but because of his high critics of the communist old methods of government. And in one of his conferences, he says that he would love to see a sequel of the movie “V for Vendetta”. Because he argues that one of the biggest problems with the communist group is that they always want to take the current system and tare it apart but they never have an organized idea of what to do once they are in the power, either by installing another government or by doing some other model, they have no idea what to do once they are there. The movie ends with the people taking the parliament, but it ends there, without them showing what is next. What could they do after they take the power if they are not organized for it, that does not end up worse than what the previous communist have done in the history of humanity? That way, probably nothing. 

That takes me to the thought that when we want to do a big change in something, either our lives, the lives of others, companies or government or anything else. We should always start by being organized in our lives ourselves. Starting with the smallest things and then building up.

Wich reminds me of Scar in the lion king, trying to turn the whole animal kingdom upside down. He had a complete plan for tearing it apart, but no plan for the time he was already in charge. No plan other than letting every carnivore eat all they wanted and destroying the circle of life that kept the balance. On the other hand, we had Simba, who had to pass through many situations in his life to organize himself and be able to later come back and restore the balance, making the kingdom the paradise it was before, and even better. 

Organizing ourselves in anything can be categorized as a habit that is created and intensifies the more we practice it. There is a personality trait that is somehow connected to this. Is a trait that makes people since they are kinds to tend to be more organized than others. But because it is also a habit, it is something that when anyone starts doing it, they get better at it and that brings many benefits with it. Many things need the order to be able to make them happen. Including any goal that you or anyone else have in their lives. 

The way of turning this into a habit and making it grow is by starting with something very small and simple to do that you can easily do every day, something that has to do with organizing yourself. Simple such as making your bed or keeping your room organized. Doing that every day will make it into a habit and then you will start organizing more things in your life step by step. So you will end up achieving more things daily. 

There is an experiment you can do to try to prove this. You can take note one night of all the things you need to do the next day. And you start the day without planning any of them, you just go with the flow and see how it goes. The next day you take note of the task for the next day again, but this time you organize the whole day so you have time to do each one of them (Including leisure time and relaxation) and see the results of each day. You will find out organizing the day makes you not only achieve more but also enjoy more, because the stress of not doing things goes away, and the time of leisure feels more like a reward, making it even better. 

Planning by the way is a topic that I wrote about in the 14th episode of this article series, you can check it out here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/14-planning-norman-lista/ in case you would like to know more about it. 

Even the most talented and most intelligent people sometimes have problems with organizing themselves from the bottom up. Like the case of Elsa, the queen of ice in the movie Frozen.

She was very wise, she even gave her sister good advice about not falling in love with someone she did not even know at all yet. But she also knew she could not handle her powers very well, and she was so powerful that if she did not organize herself and learned, she could end up hurting someone. We can see that almost happened the moment that she decided to go with what people were asking her to do, she tried to lead them without being organized with her powers, and that almost ended in a disaster.

She later had to run away and learn before she can come back knowing better and helping the kingdom again as their queen. 

 With this, I finish talking about the importance of being somehow organized, but what about doing things before someone tells us to do them or time pressures us? Things that we know that we will anyways have to do but some of us still don’t do them without that pressure. 

This question came from a person that hears the Spanish podcast version of Enfoques. Leo, from Uruguay. He wonders why some people in society and in some jobs tend to not do things if they are not told, even when they are a norm or they know they have to do them. He notices that in his job, he got selected with another person as the best workers and got the opportunity to travel and work somewhere else.

 But no one understood why the other guy was selected, he said that the only virtue he saw this guy had, was that he did everything he had to do before anyone had to tell him to do so. And even though some others were faster at work and more talented, they always needed to be pushed to do the work. This made him have an advantage. 

The other case he said was that he has a moto bike in a city parking lot. To go in this parking lot people need to show their id and face to a camera. This is always the case but most people don’t do it once they get there, the security guy has to always tell them to do that so they can go inside. So that is the origin of the question, why do some people just don’t do what they know they will have to do if they are not pushed by someone or something? And I expand it to why is it also important that we do this? 

I have the theory that the personality someone has is a mixture of their genes, their culture, and the decisions and experiences they have throughout their lives. And the general behavior of a whole culture comes from the personality of the leaders of that base culture. Because even the laws they create are laws that are directly related to their behavior and their culture. That ends up being adopted by the people that generate the whole culture. 

For example, In Venezuela, cultural traits started being implemented after the arrival of communism by Chavez and later by Maduro. Ones that were based on disorder and chaos, since they were very unordered corrupted people that did not even keep the payments to other nations in check. And the whole society got rotten, by adopting this as part of the new culture. 

However, this doesn’t mean that every single person adopted exactly these patterns. Because as I said, personality comes from the mixture of culture, genes, experiences, and decisions of each individual. 

Personality has 5 traits that are mostly used by psychologists nowadays since 1993, the 5 traits of Goldberg. One of the traits is conscientiousness. Even if a society is full of chaos because their leaders are not very highly conscientious, and the culture is similar to that, some people can still have this higher than others, and that makes them stand out from the rest. Conscientiousness is in part the trait that defines how organized and self-disciplined someone is. 

Then we have other cultures that are the exact opposite, where people tend to be much more conscientious, such as the German one. This in part is (I have the theory ) because of how they had to organize themselves after the result of the 2nd world war and the fall of the Berlin wall. Having a huge debt, especially to the united states, and being reduced to the most immoral people there ever was in the time. They needed leaders that were highly orderly and conscientious to create a new culture of work and responsibility that could lead them to the amazing country they are now. Also creating a society where something like the past terrible events could never happen again. 

The government in the second world war was actually very orderly, they used that for the exact wrong reasons but the culture already had ordered in their recipe. They just needed conscientiousness and good reasons to do things to make it good. 

We can see easily how conscientious German culture is nowadays. For example, in Germany people can go inside of a bus or the train without anyone or any machine asking them to give them or put a ticket inside. It is implied that people will buy their tickets without anyone having to tell them. That is the way the whole culture is build up. We can say that is part of why this country has advanced so fast and greatly after so many problems. But this doesn’t mean all the people are super conscientious and that everyone does everything completely ordered without anyone having to tell them. However because society is more conscientious than average, more people tend to be more conscientious than what we can see in the rest of the world. And even here, the people that are a bit more like that than others are still the ones that stand out. In society, companies and their lives. Doesn’t matter if the country is more or less conscientious, in any case, the people that embrace that more, are the ones that stand out more. 

So the answer is not to control people like in a dictatorship where they tell them always what they have to do. But the opposite, letting them free to decide but always instilling in them the values of conscientiousness making them understand that they can do things without anyone having to tell them to.

Some companies are more conscientious than others and tend to make people that come to the company to adopt these behaviors. But there are many companies that control the people more, and they don’t realize how bad this is for them. 

For example, what happened to my friend Diego, he was working in a company where he had to move some boxes from one place to another. His performance was measured by how many boxes he moved at the time he was working. This was an easy way to control people, but it is a terrible thing to do. If someone had a problem with a car that moves boxes from one side to the other and a lot of boxes fall. The people that are more conscientious will go and help pick up the boxes, but most of the people will not do anything because that would mean their performance will be affected and they could end up being fired. The company keeps the obedient ones and gets rid of the most valuable people they can have, the conscientious ones that do even the things they are not told, that keep the company running well. 

Then you have other companies like the one I work at, where the software development agile method is used, a method where the teams decide by themselves how to work and what to do. This gives trust to the employees and the employers knowing that it creates conscientiousness are happy because the employees work even harder when they are free and they want to make things better like this. 

If someone does not understand and even with the culture of the company they are not conscientious enough, then they might end up being fired. But what about the people that are like that in society? The people that any way we need them to be conscientious so the whole system can work but they just don’t do things at least someone tells them they have to all the time. Well, I believe the answer to this is creating habits in them. For example, in 1930 sugar was destroying the smiles of people; people started losing their teeth; they needed to do something. Toothpaste was invented but people did not see the importance of it. Even if they were told to brush their teeth, if they were not told every day they would stop at some point. Like when someone is a smoker and doesn’t stop even if someone tells them they can develop cancer, just because they don’t see the immediate result. And then when they are already sick, sometimes the habit is so strong they don’t stop anyway. Well in the case of tooth past it was something like that, no one used it until they had no teeth. 

So Claude C. Hopkins, one of the biggest advertising pioneers was given the task of solving this problem using Pepsodent’s toothpaste. He studied dentistry from books and he came up with a way to create a habit.

 Habits are created by having a cue that makes people engage, later a routine and a reward, and usually, this reward needs to have something that makes people crave coming back to do the habit until it is so strong that people do it forever. 

So he notices that by using toothpaste the film in the teeth would disappear, everyone had a film in their teeth after even drinking coffee and everyone could like the idea of having a prettier smile just by doing something in less than 5 minutes every day. So he created an advertisement with a mouth with film, then the same mouth with the toothpaste and at the end a shiny smile. To make the reward have something that people could crave, they added the mint flavor to the paste. This made people crave the mint as an assurance that their teeth were clean. Otherwise, people would not feel it and engage less. 

Pepsodent's habit loop from the book "The power of habit" by Charles Duhigg 

This was so successful that later it spread to the whole world, in Venezuela still 40 years later a huge awareness campaign had to be done to make people end up getting the habit, but it worked in the whole world in the end. Nowadays no one can even imagine a world without brushing our teeth, and society does not need to tell everyday everyone to do it. 

So with a habit, we can make everyone do what they have to do without anyone telling them. But what about those cases when everyone in a group knows there is one thing to be done, that one of them should do, but no one does it waiting for the other one to do it? 

Well here I would say that the best thing is to make people understand the values and advantages that come from having a responsibility, I argue that It is not power that brings responsibility but responsibility that brings power. And this power leads the person to have a better life for them and the people around, You can read more about this topic in the 4th episode of this series of articles here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/4-responsibility-leads-power-norman-lista/

So going back to the story of when my dad decided to tell me I should not set up that cafe.

I realized that my dad noticed that I was not really organized in my life from the bottom. I had a girlfriend with whom I was having many problems and I was recently just got kicked out of university. I knew I had to “put my house in order” but I was not doing it in time, maybe because I was scared, I was used to the life I had, and I was afraid of having even more problems with my girlfriend but the case is that my dad didn’t think, even though I was very organized with the idea of the cafe, that I was capable of dealing with that if I was not organized from the bottom of my life. 

Years later, I had another girlfriend with whom I had a perfect relationship with no problems at all, and I was almost graduating from university, and then I did not need my dad’s shop anymore, but I wanted to build a gym and I needed some extra money to complete my budget. That time my dad saw I was more organized from the bottom and he accepted helping me. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this one. 

Until next time.